The Ancient Paths

When we think of a very spiritual or devout person , we usually think of someone who is beyond this world and our lived experience . Maybe this individual that we picture lives a solitary life, they are occupied with loving God every minute of every day ? Or perhaps we think of a very public personality that ministers on stage in front of thousands? Maybe it’s an influencer with a huge number of followers?   Our first thoughts in this vein don’t tend to be centered on the quiet and patient believer who works a job , has children (or none), and struggles to pay bills. We tend to separate the holy from the mundane, from what we think constitutes the normal, the usual ; contrasted with what seems spiritual . Yet God is present in the totality of our lives and all facets of it. He is the God who is with us either in deep prayer or in a bad day at work. He doesn’t compartmentalize life like I tend to do. I naturally make boxes for myself; the holy goes over here and t...

“Holy, holy, holy is the  Lord  of hosts;   the whole earth is full of his glory!” -Isaiah 6 :3   When we read Isaiah’s famous vision, we are transported into another  realm , the one where God dwells concretely and tangib ly. We are seeing something that we long for as much as we fear it, a vision of the awesome and terrifying glory of God.  We long to see Him fully because like Augustine said, “our hearts are restless until they rest in You ;”  yet we  do not  have language  or capacity to hold in our eyes the piercing and blinding power of God’s being. We can only  fall down  in the face of this vision and cry out “woe  is  me! ”  This  is not  an exercise in piety, it is a visceral reaction to God’s otherness, His strangeness and alien-ness. He is so beyond words.  In our current situation, we tend to not see God in this way.  Maybe this  is  a mercy ,  maybe this  is...

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.  (John 1:5)   Without Jesus we do not understand Who God is.  W e also do not understand  ourselves  either.  Humans are born with limited  information available to us . We know we exist and that others exis t with us, but we do not know our purpose and  the meaning of our lives.   Without  someone telling  us, we cannot know .  We look around us grasping for value , for direction, and there is no other human who really knows  the answer . There are guesses but nothing concrete.  We  also  somehow  long  to become a  perfection that we  do not  consist of and for a  likewise perfect  world f ree of darkness and ignorance.  We know we are  made for   more,  yet  we  do not   know for  what.  Theologian Suzanne de Dietrich wrote about this dilemma  and the...